Who was/is Jim Reeves ? - CDs, Vinyl LPs, DVD and more

Somewhere along the line, Jim Reeves got the nickname ‘Gentleman Jim.’ Whether he was the gentleman that the publicity machine would have you believe, is a matter of dispute. In what was then the small, easygoing town of Nashville, Jim was often legendarily difficult on sessions. He was suspicious of people he didn’t know, and often blunt to the point of rudeness. Even so, it’s probably safe to say that no-one reaches a pinnacle in the music business and stays there by being Mister Nice Guy. All his audience knew and cared was that Jim rarely let the mask slip in public, and to his longstanding friends he was loyal and caring.

This isn’t the place to delve into Jim Reeves’s personal life. His widow, Mary, kept it under wraps, and nurtured the image of Jim that she wanted the world to see. Now and again, the occasional story surfaced hinting at troubled waters and recent biographies have given us more detail than we ever had before, but this set is a celebration of Jim’s music and his career.

James Travis Reeves was born August 20, 1923, which means that the man who showed the way forward for country music after Hank Williams’s death was actually older, by a month, than Hank himself. As early as 1953, though, Jim was routinely lopping a year off his age for biographies.

Jim was born between Deadwood and Galloway, in Panola County, Texas. “If you look for my little town on the map,” he once said, “you won’t find it.” The nearest large city is Shreveport, Louisiana, thirty-five miles to the northeast, or Carthage, Texas eight miles to the west. Jim was the ninth and last child born to Tom Reeves and Mary Beulah Adams Reeves (known as ‘Beulah’), and the eighth to live. On Jim’s birth certificate, his place-of-birth is given as Logan, Texas.

Tom Reeves died on May 1, 1924 when Jim was less than a year old, and his mother raised the family alone. The older boys went to work to help support the family. If times were tough, they were tougher still for the Reeves family. The family occupied one of the lowest rungs on the ladder.

Jim died twenty-five years before tell-all biography became the norm, so his recollections were studiedly vague and often contradictory. In his book, Jim Reeves—His Untold Story, Larry Jordan compiled a detailed and absorbing account of Jim’s early years from Mary’s personal effects and other sources, so we direct you there.

Talking about how he first got interested in music in a 1960 interview, Jim said he had seen a man playing and singing on a street corner when he was five – and that fired him with the ambition to be a singer. He went home, he said, and made himself a guitar out of cigar boxes and rubber bands.

3-CD Mini-Box (CD-format) with c. 100-page booklet, 76 tracks. Total playing time approx. 205 mns. • For the first time ever the early Jim Reeves sessions are correctly documented. • East Texas Country Music expert Kevin Coffey...

​The Jim Reeves Radio Show: Monday February 24, 1958 is a priceless moment in music history. It's the very beginning of the Nashville Sound with Nashville-based musicians making very creditable pop music for a national radio audience, and it's the end of live radio....

4-CD box (LP-size) with 24-page book, 109 tracks. Playing time approx. 201 mns. The side of Jim Reeves that nobody knows! In the late 1950s and early 1960s, Gentleman Jim recorded many transcriptions for Country Style USA, Leatherneck Jamboree, Country Hoedown....

From the master tapes The Jim Reeves Radio Show: Monday February 24, 1958 is a priceless moment in music history. It's the very beginning of the Nashville Sound with Nashville-based musicians making very creditable pop music for a national radio audience, and it's...

DVD - NTSC - Code Free - Color Time 81:50 This is Jim's only full-length movie, set in South Africa, where he was incredibly popular both before and after his death. The DVD will contain: two movie trailers, the movie in the 35mm widescreen version, and the...

1-CD with 28-page booklet, 31 tracks. Playing time approx. 80 mns. Forty years ago, a small Beechcraft Bonanza private airplane plunged from the sky just short of its destination: Nashville airport. Both occupants of the plane were killed. One of them was Jim...

4-CD box (LP-size) with 24-page book, 117 tracks. Playing time approx. 212 mns. The side of Jim Reeves that nobody knows! In the late 1950s and early 1960s, Gentleman Jim recorded many transcriptions for Country Music Time. Unavailable since the day they were...